The betwixt and between Saranap, and why it's not Dewingville

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, March 19, 2006

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The betwixt and between Saranap, and why it's not Dewingville

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Driving from Lafayette to Walnut Creek, you could pass through Saranap without ever knowing it. There are no welcome signs for this Balkanized village, and the name isn't on any business in the commercial strip. You can't even find it on an addressed envelope.

Saranap is a long-lost railroad town and, ironically, the only place that honors it is the Saranap Filling Station at the cross of Boulevard Way and Olympic Boulevard. Standing sentry are gas pumps from the 1940s to '60s, painted in the livery of Sky Chief, Mohawk, Signal, Gilmore, Richfield, Flying A. Proceed into the office and you'll pass a benchload of gas station folklorists in the Goober Pyle mode. Time it right and you'll come inside just as Dorothy Ligda, 91, arrives to check sales and stock of her new book, "Saranap Then and Now."

The filling station gets its own chapter in the book because it sits where the train depot used to. This goes back to 1911, when passenger service on the Oakland & Antioch line came down from Bay Point, headed for San Francisco Bay.

By 1913, it took just an hour and a half, by ferry and electric rail, to get from the city to the destination called Ramon Junction. Summer homes sprouted up. Soon a branch line to Danville was in the works, and it was decided that Ramon Junction needed a more dignified name. The people doing the deciding were Sam Naphtaly and Stephen Dewing, the two main landowners. Dewing modestly offered to call it Dewingville. Naphtaly countered with an abridgement of his mother Sarah Naphtaly's first and last names. Naphtaly donated more land than Dewing, so Saranap it was.

Ligda couldn't locate any Naphtaly descendants, but there is still a Dewing living in his family's house. She decides to go ask if there is lingering bitterness at the naming slight. As her chauffeur and publisher, Ted Fuller of Pleasant Hill Press, rolls his Saturn up Boulevard Way, Ligda explains that the city of Walnut Creek has already annexed the area of Saranap that is now Rossmoor, to surround it on three sides.

Saranapans are by tradition more to the hillbilly side. Ligda, a retired Pleasant Hill schoolmarm who has lived here for 41 years, couldn't get an official count of the population, or even how many old summer cottages are tucked into the hollows. "I've asked the county supervisor and she doesn't know either," she says.

Boulevard crosses Saranap Avenue, the only reference to the past. The freeway interchange, where 24 meets 680, is the borderland, and just before going under Ligda has Fuller swing the Saturn right on Dewing Lane.

At the intersection of Warren is a two-story brown-shingle with a palm tree in front. This is the Dewing house, built in 1915, the year Saranap first appeared on Contra Costa County maps. In Saranap, Ligda herself is the only relic older than this house. The Dewings once owned 318 acres. They're down to their last two thirds of an acre and standing on it is Tom Dewing, representing the fifth generation.

Dewing had not yet made it over to the filling station to buy "Saranap Then and Now," and is unaware that the area came close to being named Dewingville.

"Dewingville," he says slowly, trying it out. "Boy, wouldn't that be wonderful."

He's the only Dewing left in Dewingville. "You could run for mayor," says the publisher, Fuller, hazarding a quip. But it wouldn't help Dewing's campaign that he is wearing a Walnut Creek sweatshirt.

"If they made a Saranap sweatshirt, I'd buy one," he offers. And if they made a Dewingville sweatshirt? "I'd buy two."

Ligda withholds her opinion on the name until the car has backed out. "No doubt," she says, "I'm for Saranap."

Cutting across Boulevard to the Saranap Filling Station, to get an update on sales, Ligda recounts how she came to write the book. A neighbor had started doing interviews in 1973, but had to retire to a nursing home with the written history still unfinished. Unstarted too. Ligda offered to edit the work, "and they could never find anything she had done," she says.

Back at the station, attendant Jim Bradshaw has been tracking sales the old-fashioned way. He has a box of 20 and every time one moves out the door he marks a line on the box then puts a slash across it to mark five. He's already sold 12 of the 20.

"We get people in here saying, 'How did Saranap get its name?' Bradshaw says, pointing to a display he made for the book. "Nowadays I can just say 'there it is, the history.' "

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